As you know, those of us present in the meeting house are going to conduct a fire drill as this service is ending. Zoomers: we tried very hard but we couldn’t figure out how to include you in this exercise, but we couldn’t find a way to do it. But at least we agreed to do it at the end of the service so you wouldn’t have to wait around for ten minutes while we exit and re-enter the meeting house. For those of you here in the sanctuary, please know there’s a part of me that hates asking you to do this. On its face it seems to be mostly an inconvenience. We all know, more or less, where the exits are. We all know to move toward the doors in a calm, patient, orderly manner. We all know that if we go to our cars, we are not to drive away until given the ‘okay’ – that will be the bell ringing – and we stay in our cars because in the event of an actual fire, the fire trucks need to enter down our exit ramp. (If you didn’t know that, you know it now.) And of course our children know how to do this. Those in school are overly familiar not only with fire drills, but also lockdown drills—an unfortunate feature of our gun-saturated society. The bottom line is, we know how to do this.
Having said that, there’s another part of me—a larger part, frankly—that feels we absolutely have to do this; and that it is negligence not to conduct this drill; and it is negligence in general not to follow the guidance of our emergency response plan; and not to work with our emergency preparedness team in moving our that plan more deeply into the consciousness of our congregation. The more we discuss the possible emergencies we might have to confront; the more resources we dedicate to mitigating risk; the more we conduct table-top exercises in which we talk through what we would do in a specific emergency situation; and the more we conduct actual drills, the better prepared we will be in the event of an actual emergency. I like how our emergency response team leader Cressy Goodwin is fond of putting it: The more we do these activities, the more we create shared expectations. And shared expectations lead to predictability.
Preparation doesn’t mean we will respond perfectly in an emergency, but it does mean we will have some readiness built in, and that readiness can keep people safe, prevent injury, even prevent death. Again, knowing what we know about the risks—as minimal as they are—knowing that even if the alarms aren’t sounding right now, we still ought to be listening for them; we would be negligent not to weave emergency preparedness into our congregational life.
As we approach this morning’s fire drill, I am wondering about preparation as a form of spirituality, drilling as a form of spiritual practice, or ‘being prepared’ or ‘being ready’ as a spiritual state of being. There’s a wonderful story from my colleague, the Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, which I’m pretty sure I’ve shared once before, called “A Wake-up Call.”[1] It’s about the time she received the gift o a personal alarm device from a friend who was worried about her safety. One day, many months after receiving the gift, she accidentally triggered the alarm while riding the subway, but didn’t realize the noise was coming from her bag. People asked her about it, but were too polite to point out that it seemed to be coming from her. She mused that it must be some hold-over from the Cold War days. Finally, she’s in the grocery store, wondering why everyone is staring at her, and a store clerk whom she had asked about the location of the popcorn says “I’ll tell you [where it is] … but only if you tell me about that noise.” Even then she still doesn’t understand and asks why everyone keeps asking her about it. “Because lady, … it’s coming from you.”
It’s not explicitly a story about being ready as a spiritual state of being. For her it’s an acknowledgement that sometimes the alarm, the warning, the noise, the problem really is ours and we need the capacity to recognize that the people around us may be very gently trying to help us understand this. But this morning I offer it as a story about all the alarms that are sounding, or may in time sound in our lives. Whether they’re coming from us or somewhere beyond us, are we paying attention? Are we taking steps to prepare ourselves—for health crises, for disasters related to climate change, for power outages, for fires, for floods, for shooters, for political instability? For what happens after November 5th, 2024? To the extent our preparation helps us respond well to emergencies and crises, to the extent it keeps us safer, protects us from injury, prevents unnecessary suffering, prevents premature death—to the extent it preserves life, well-being, joy, relationships—I say acts of preparation are spiritual acts. I say being ready is a spiritual state of being.
Having said that, I confess I encounter in this notion some dissonances with how we often conceive of the spiritual life. I wonder if you do too. I’m speaking in generalities here, but often Unitarian Universalists—and people in general—pursue spirituality and spiritual practices out of a desire for peace, comfort, solace, silence and presence in the midst of active, often tense, occasionally chaotic lives—lives with sometimes complicated pasts that we struggle to reconcile; lives with concerns about the future—our own as well as those of our children and grandchildren—futures that we can’t easily predict; lives with hectic schedules; lives with endless kids’ activities; lives with those never-ending series of responsibilities and obligations; lives too often over-committed. Spirituality is the antidote to such lives. Spirituality gets us back in touch with who we are, with nature, with the divine as we understand it. Spirituality invites us to pause, to breath, to rest, to be present. There’s a very basic Buddhist influence here. For example, when describing Zen meditation, the Unitarian Universalist minister and Soto Zen priest, the Rev. James Ishmael Ford, says “in Zen one is not escaping reality but encountering it in the most intimate way. We are going nowhere else, not to heaven, nor angelic realms, not to any special place other than here. We are simply allowing ourselves the opportunity to experience the moment genuinely.”[2] That’s hard to do when you’re preparing for an emergency.
I suspect those of you who practice yoga have a similar understanding of what is happening spiritually during your practice. Moving through a series of poses, you are coming back to your body, you are finding grounding, you are experiencing a moment of peace and presence in an otherwise busy and at times chaotic world. This is not the experience we imagine when preparing or emergencies.
I also experience this spirituality of the present moment in the words of Jesus when he responds to the Pharisees’ question about when the Kingdom of God is coming. “[They will not say] ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” Sometimes translated, “within you.” It’s a different theology from the eastern traditions, but for me the spiritual insight is the same. Don’t look to the past. Don’t look to the future. Don’t look beyond yourself. Look within. Be here, now. Be present. That’s hard to do when you’re preparing for an emergency.
When I ask us to take that collective breath at the beginning of worship; when I invite you to sit comfortably in your chair and find that place inside of you, where you may go when you long for comfort and solace, where you commune with that which is holy in your life, I am inviting you to be present. It’s not the only spiritual dimension of our public worship, but it is an essential dimension. It’s hard to do when you’re planning for an emergency.
Finding and experiencing presence is a common way we understand spirituality and spiritual practice, and emergency planning, table-top exercises, fire and lockdown drills don’t fit easily into this basic spiritual modality. And worse, because they demand that we contemplate emergency situations, we’re not only focusing on the future—i.e., things that could possibility happen—but we’re focusing on a potentially frightening future, which can heighten anxiety, which puts the present moment even further out of our grasp. From one angle, emergency planning feels like an invitation into ongoing stress. So where is the spirituality in a fire drill?
Here’s my thinking on this. First, I am indebted to Cressy Goodwin who, again, leads our emergency response team and who has decades of experience in this field, for his constant, gentle reminder that yes, contemplating emergency situations can produce anxiety; yes, preparation brings with it an inherent focus on future events; but the only way to truly reduce that anxiety and unhook ourselves from fears of a future over which we have no control is to practice, to prepare, to make ourselves ready. In fact, the more ready we are, the less anxiety we’ll feel about possible emergencies, and the more ease we’ll experience dropping into the present moment in worship or in other settings. Shared expectations lead to predictability. Share expectations also lead to peace of mind, confidence, and relaxation. In this sense, preparing for the future and being in the present moment are not dissonant, not counter-indicated, not working at cross-spiritual purposes. They are complementary. They are partners. They work together.
I went back this week to the spiritual writer Thomas Moore. Some of you will remember I taught a class a decade ago on his 2014 book, A Religion of One’s Own. He also gave a lecture here in 2015. One of the insights I take from Thomas Moore is the notion of a reality larger than us, beyond us, though certainly inclusive of us, that speaks to us in a variety of ways all the time. It speaks to us through nature, through art and creativity, through relationships with other people, through prayer and meditation, through physical activity, through hunches and intuitions. It’s not an alarm going off in our bag, but it is a constant flow of insight and meaning. And we miss most of it. We miss it because our lives are hectic, because we’re anxious or scared, focused on our immediate tasks, not paying attention, or just not in the habit of listening. So Moore talks about being ready to receive the meaning that exists all around us. He coaches us to develop our capacity for intuition. He’s not talking about emergency planning, though he notes that the word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin word that means ‘to keep watch over,’ which is one way to understand what we’re doing with emergency planning. We’re keeping watch over our well-being as a congregation. He says “to be intuitive is to be prepared to see some new kind of information or insight that is faint and passing.”[3] And then he offers ways to practice being intuitive. I don’t have time to explore some of those methods right now, but if anyone is curious to learn more about that, please feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to set up a group discussion if there’s enough interest.
He’s offering us a spirituality of being ready. And here again, this spirituality of “being ready” is not in conflict with a spirituality that brings us into the present moment. Moore is naming that without readiness, we miss so much of what is happening in the present moment. So let’s add to our spiritual lives the state of being ready.
This fire drill, is one way make ourselves ready. May it be a boon and a blessing to our lives together.
Amen and blessed be.
[1] Southern, Vanessa Rush, “A Wake-up Call” in This Piece of Eden (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2001) pp. 56-58.
[2] Ford, James Ishmael, This Very Moment (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1996) p. 43.
[3] Moore, Thomas, A Religion of One’s Own (New York: Penguin Random House, 2014) pp. 204-205.
Comments